On the protection of minorities
Dear friends
Out, brief candle?
I've been unwell for exactly a month; over the course of the winter, I've been unwell for quite a lot more than that. By unwell, I mean relatively minor viral infections, the most recent one almost certainly Covid. But of course, with me, viral infections always trigger my ever-lurking psychiatric demons, so I've been experiencing nightmares, psychotic hallucinations, and very persistent 'suicidal ideation', to give it it's polite name. All this means my brain is so full of noise and chaos that it's hard to concentrate on even simple tasks.
It's... very trying.
Unblocking the chain
I've just been listening to a podcast by someone I very much respect, in which she's being sold snake oil by a crypto bro. It's in the nature of good people that they are trusting, and there's enough appearance of complexity around blockchain to bedazzle the credulous.
But essentially blockchain is a very simple idea, and once you understand it, you understand why it's a very bad idea.
The properties of the system, and their values
Lisp is the list processing language; that is what its name means. It processes data structures built of lists — which may be lists of lists, or lists of numbers, or lists of any other sort of data item provided for by the designers of the system.
But how is a list, in a computer, actually implemented?
Blog IV
I've been blogging moderately systematically since 2004. My first blog was an exercise in 'eating my own dogfood'; I used PRES, a (rather nice) content management system I wrote in 1997 for Alasdair Morgan MP's website. However, two decades ago, web technology was changing rapidly, and by 2011 it got to the point where PRES was no longer worth the effort required to keep it up to date (and I was no longer well enough to cope with running my own infrastructure).
So I switched to Google's Blogger platform. In those days, Google still had the motto don't be evil; sadly, since then, they've dropped the first word from it.
I made the decision a year ago to eat my own dogfood again, and switched to Smeagol, a little wiki engine I wrote ten years ago which is actually quite good and I'm quite proud of; but I've been having problems keeping it running, and you don't need anything that heavyweight to run a blog.